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What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue?
In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer As...
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Number of Pages: 128
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Chen Chen’s poetry is playful and silly and joyful in a way that feels distinctly queer. He messes with form, he interrupts himself, he makes his own rules, he puts all his exuberance onto the page. His poems are not frivolous, and the ones in this collection deal with plenty of r...
Show More
Chen Chen’s poetry is playful and silly and joyful in a way that feels distinctly queer. He messes with form, he interrupts himself, he makes his own rules, he puts all his exuberance onto the page. His poems are not frivolous, and the ones in this collection deal with plenty of real-world heaviness: racism, the pandemic, grief. But Chen Chen takes silliness seriously, and he takes joy seriously, and that’s what makes his poems so unique. They’re queerly alive. They’re soft, and they sometimes cut.
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- May 4, 2023
by Linda Hart
What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue?
In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Always at work in the wrecked heart of this new collection is a switchboard operator, picking up and connecting calls. Raucous 2 a.m. prank calls. Whispered-in-a-classroom emergency calls. And sometimes, its pages record the dropping of a call, a failure or refusal to pick up. With irrepressible humor and play, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness.
Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas, and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat categorizations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold onto one another.
(From Goodreads)